Boxers or briefs? When it comes to safety, I choose briefs.
We have some things to cover, so this occasional installment of Safety Briefs will not have a long introduction, other than to say that there is an interesting mixed bag of information here – something about improving locomotive safety on railroad tracks, a study regarding digital eye strain, and the management of risks involving carbon dioxide gases.
Image courtesy of Flickr user Bob Adams via a Creative Commons license’
Don’t Miss the Train!
Our first safety brief takes us to the American frontier days – workin’ on the railroad, all the live long day.
In response to a 2014 head-on collision between two freight trains in Arkansas, the Federal Railroad Administration – an office inside the U.S. Department of Transportation – has put out an advisory for locomotive safety that referred to what is called a safety alerter, which is an alarm that goes off in the cab of the locomotive whenever an engineer does not have interaction with the locomitive within a period of time. This alerter is meant to keep the engineer engaged with the process of driving the train.
The advisory recommends that all railroad companies ensure that their locomotives have an alerter system installed or modified in such a way that the alerter timing cycle resets automatically without any direction action from the engineer.
Don’t Be So Gaseous!
Carbon dioxide is the latest problem in air quality concerns (replacing carbon monoxide, which was the prevalent thing in the aerosol days of the 1990s), both in the overall environment and in workplaces. A firm called Onset recently put out a white paper addressing the importance of air quality in indoor facilities, especially in terms of filtration of carbon dioxide gases. In the paper, Onset discusses the research that provides a direct correlation between carbon dioxide levels indoors and the reports of discomfort and loss of productivity by workers.
As carbon dioxide is odorless and colorless as a gas, the paper was geared toward facility managers and construction engineers to be aware of the risks of carbon dioxide and to effectively address the ventilation concerns and needs of the work space, whether it is an entire warehouse or individual office or workroom spaces.
Screening the Eyes
As computer devices have changed in size and beome more portable and thus more available to us over the last decade, an issue of eye strain has become prevalent.
It was always said when we were kids that we shouldn’t sit so close to the television or it woudl hurt our eyes, right? Well, that same old-fashioned principle applies to our desktops, laptops, tablets and even smartphones. While these devicces keep us conencted and engaged in our lives even when on the go, they have had a negative impact on overall vision and eye health.
An annual survey by The Vision Council was released earlier this year, and it showed that increased use of digital devices increases the risk of eye strain and vision trouble among the general population. It was reported in the survey that nearly seven in 10 adults in America use a smartphone, which is an increase of more than 50 percent in just four years. And about three in seven Americans use a tablet computer, which is up about 65 percent over the level of use in 2012. With that, there are that many more people who are exposed to digital devices and using their eyes to see these screens, and that has raised the risk of a increased number of Americans with vision trouble, inluding eye strain.
Small print and pixelated graphics and images contribute to eye strain, as do blue light coming from the screen, and holding the device at an awkward viewing angle or too far away from the eyes. It is generally recommended that users get away from their devices for a few minutes every hour or two of constant use.